Inspiron 2350 Fan - replaced in Dec 2016, now making noises again

Thanks for the tips. Back in December I was unable to find a OEM dell fan. I did search online. Many seemed suspicious as to whether or not they would work.  Now I know exactly where to look.   I'm not doing anything different than I normally do. I use my PC for work and most of my software databases are on the cloud. Outlook for email. MS Publish. Sometimes multiple Chrome windows open.  No videos.  Room temp is normal.  The fan is a bit quieter today, but it still is rattling a bit.  I installed Speedfan software yesterday and told it to use automatic settings.

Dell fans for the 2350 are freely available to anyone directly from Dell Spare Parts, or from Amazon and various other vendors that sell Dell OEM spare parts, and eBay, too, for less than ~20 bucks.

If the fan is running faster and louder than "usual", that probably means the CPU is getting hot. So is your room temp higher than "usual"? Are you doing lots of CPU intensive activities, eg watching vids?

It's also possible the thermal paste between the CPU and the heat sink has dried out. In this case, you'd have to remove the heat sink, clean both surfaces and apply a thin coat of fresh thermal paste before re-attaching the heat sink.  Check the manual for instructions for removing and re-attaching the heat sink.

downloads.dell.com/.../inspiron-2350-aio_service manual_en-us.pdf

It's possible a fan retaining screw(s) is loose and the fan is vibrating, or maybe the Mylar is peeling off the fan and heat sink and flapping in the breeze caused by the fan..??

SpeedFan typically can't control fan speeds on Dell PCs because of the thermal sensor in Dell fans, unless he's found a way around that problem.  And even if SpeedFan can now control fan speeds on Dell PCs, I'd be cautious about using it because a slow fan speed might let the CPU overheat and start causing crashes or even get fried.

BTW: Do you have the latest version of BIOS (A09) which was the first version to support Win 10?

www.dell.com/.../DriversDetails

If you need to update BIOS, read/follow the instructions carefully. There's always a chance a BIOS update will fail and brick the motherboard. So you update BIOS entirely at your own risk. :emotion-5:

I have A09 bios. I think I found the issue - something is pegging the hard drive at 100% almost constantly to the point now where sometimes I cannot even get online.  Researching it as I can (while being swamped with work at the same time).

When the fan is racing, look in Task Manager on the Performance tab to see what process is hogging CPU time, aside from System Idle process.

Scanned thoroughly for malware recently?

The CPU usage is minimal, it's only the HD that is getting pegged.  Task manager is not much help so I used ProcExp. It appears to be iCloud that is the culprit. I did a repair on it, and it is a bit better, but still not perfect and still pegging, so further investigation will be needed. My backup software might also be the culprit.  Since I had to reinstall Windows, so many settings that I had stable were changed. I'm positive it's not malware.   I have MalwareBytes pro that runs constantly, and Vipre virus that does quick scans daily, and deep scans weekly and also checks emails, websites and facebook.

Sounds like you're on the right track to dealing with some software issues, and it's not a hardware problem... :emotion-5:

Makes me wonder if the last time you had this problem, and replaced the CPU fan, you also just had software issues..??

Hope you get things sorted.

In case anyone is following this thread, the fan started to get loud again about a month ago and would have good days and bad days where it was really loud, then last Friday it died for good and I got the fan failure notice on a reboot. This means two fan failures in less than a year.

Unfortunately, "stuff" happens...

Guess what?  It's now December and the fan is going out again for the third time.